Colin Johnson’s blog

Historical Facts Don’t Exist

To historians, “history” basically means the (complex, disputed) knowledge that contemporary people have about what happened in the past. To the general public, “history” is the stuff that happened—about which contemporary people might have limited evidence, disputes of interpretation, etc. This can lead to confusion in communicating ideas about the methodology and ontology of history. For example, when I first came across people saying things along the lines of “historical facts change over time”, I thought that they were embracing a much more radical vision of history than they were. They were making the (important) point that what we call “facts” are based on incomplete evidence and biased by political/social/religious views and our biases coming from the contemporary world. I thought that they were making the much more radical claim that the subjective experience of people in the past changed due to our contemporary interpretations—a kind of reverse causality.